NATIONAL GALLERY/
SOFIA ARSENAL – MUSEUM FOR CONTEPORARY ART
PRESENTS
Georgi Donov and Kosyo Minchev
The Island of Sculpture
12 December 2025 – 15 February 2026
Vernissage on Friday, 12 December 2025, 6 – 8 pm
SAMCA, 2, Cherni Vrah Blvd., Sofia
„…I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”
Mark Rothko
In the unprecedented temporal flux of our present age, contemporary sculpture has undergone profound transformation. It seems to have lost the slower, contemplative time once essential to its creation, evolving instead into a phenomenon of the “now”—an art form defined by innovation, material experimentation, 3D printing, video, light, and interactive media. As a result, sculpture today often exceeds its own traditional definitions.
Georgi Donov and Kosyo Minchev offer a different perspective on the contemporary moment. They return to the figurative, yet approach it through the lens of conceptual image-making, engaging the full breadth of art history. For them, form remains central—not as formalism, but as a field of lived experience shaped by spiritual, moral, and philosophical principles.
Their work challenges prevailing assumptions about sculpture, while resisting the clichéd “topicality” of contemporary doctrine. Their artistic position is not tied to any specific geographical site but unfolds as an inner, mental space—a rethinking of tradition and its contemporary resonance.
The Island of Sculpture is therefore not a physical location. It is a state of mind: an understanding, a sensibility, a belief. It is a sacred terrain of form, memory, pathos, and the intimate exhilaration of creation. A place that inherits the modern sculptural tradition while conceptualizing it through time, yet retaining its purity.
In this way, Donov and Minchev remain contemporary without becoming an illustration of contemporaneity. They are at once classical in their treatment of form, where aesthetics is guided by personal ethical and moral convictions. They construct their own sense of time—unburdened by the need to be liked, to be correct, or to imitate—driven solely by the necessity to shape a metaphysical experience of the sublime. Their sculpture is filtered through a deeply personal psychological expressionism, acquiring density like a volcanic formation or a manifestation of spiritualized matter.
What they propose is a renewed understanding of life within art—an act of creation that transforms tradition through individual experience.
Is it possible today, in a time of vanishing time, when everything changes the instant it appears, for sculpture to remain truly relevant while sustaining both its material reality and our contemporary sensibilities? The answer is clearly yes. This is possible when artists distance themselves from the doctrines of the moment and remain alone with time, with creation, and with themselves—on the ISLAND OF SCULPTURE—reflecting on our relationship with the world and believing in the act of making.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Genadi Gatev
Media Partner: BTA
For further information:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Genadi Gatev, curator of the exhibition, 00359 884 722 218
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD, Head of SAMCA, 00359 879 834 030